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ALEXANDRIA, VA.— She works full time and takes college classes on the side and has a life, and she had things to do on a late-summer Sunday afternoon that did not involve sitting in an office and cold-calling 51 people.

But Donald Trump was pulling close in the polls, and she’s a Muslim. And so, for first the time in her life, Nagina Bhatti, 26, showed up in September at a political phone bank gathering.

It was run by Emerge USA, a group trying to make sure Muslims vote. At the end of the two hours calling Virginia Muslims from an airy room in a suburb of Washington, D.C., session leader Remaz Abdelgader, a composed young woman in a blue headscarf, had the volunteers write down why they had come.

“I don’t want Trump to win!” Bhatti wrote.

Across the country, the openly Islamophobic message of a Republican presidential nominee who wants to ban foreign Muslims from entering the country appears to be propelling American Muslims to their highest-ever levels of political interest, involvement and registration.

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Imams once reluctant to engage in politics have begun talking about the stakes and opening their doors to registration efforts. Leading Muslim groups have launched ambitious get-out-the-vote campaigns. And young U.S.-born or U.S.-raised Muslims, often more comfortable speaking out than their parents, have thrown themselves into activism at unseen rates.

At civics training classes that used to draw 10 or 15 people at Houston mosques, 60 or 65 were attending this year, local Emerge leader Nabila Mansoor said this summer.

“It’s the Trump factor,” she said. “A lot of people are realizing that maybe sitting on the sidelines is just not enough.”

Aman Ali, a New York City storyteller who spends 200 days a year touring, said he has never heard so many Muslims talk about an election.

In the 1990s, he said, “There were even people that had the idea of boycotting elections because ‘this a non-Muslim system.’ Absurd, archaic thinking. And now it’s the complete opposite. Where if you say ‘that’s un-Islamic,’ that’s the stupidest thing you could have ever said. Now it’s: ‘We must vote.’”

And at the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center mosque in Falls Church, Va., imam Johari Abdul-Malik’s Friday sermons on the importance of voting have so enthused the 3,500 worshippers that he said he is now being forced to gently inform eager non-citizens that they are not yet eligible to cast ballots.

Trump’s message, Abdul-Malik said, has had two unintended consequences.

“For Muslims abroad, it helps radicalize them. And for Muslims at home, it encourages them to register to vote,” he said. “Malcolm X called it the ballot or the bullet. For people overseas, who are frustrated they can’t vote , it’s the bullet. And for people here, it’s about the ballot.”

The community’s mobilization comes despite its significant apprehension about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, whose staunch support for Israel and general hawkishness about the Middle East have raised widespread concern.

“She is the lesser of two evils. That’s pretty much it for most people,” Bhatti said.

Clinton has hired a director of Muslim outreach, cheering community leaders. But she has also irked them. Her website promises she will protect Israel but does not say the same about Palestinians. In Monday’s debate, she criticized Trump’s anti-Muslim stances only on the grounds that Muslims “can provide information to us” about terror threats.

“I find it very troubling from Hillary. Again and again it’s repeated,” said Ali, 31. “I think it’s well-intended, I don’t think she’s saying anything discriminatory, but it’s been very frustrating. It’s like: yo, you realize we’re more than terrorism-fighters?”

Ali, though, is a firm Clinton supporter, as are most Muslims who find her highly imperfect. For them, this time, policy nuance has taken a back seat to the matter of basic respect.

“When you look at the two candidates, somebody’s pro-you and somebody’s anti-you. So what are you going to do?” said Keith Murphy, Emerge’s Pittsburgh leader.

Trump’s extremism has solidified a massive shift that began after 9/11, when George W. Bush invaded Iraq and passed anti-terror laws that curtailed Muslims’ civil liberties. In 2000, more than two-thirds of Muslims voted for the Republican candidate. In 2012, one poll suggested, more than four-fifths voted for Democrat Barack Obama.

The community is complicated to target: it is still tiny in relative terms — about 3 million people, or 1 per cent of the U.S. population — and it is religiously, linguistically and ethnically diverse. (A fifth is black; a fifth is Asian.) And well over half of American Muslims were born elsewhere, many of them in undemocratic countries.

Even this year, community campaigners say they are sometimes confronted by religious and cultural barriers. Olivia Cantu, Emerge’s South Florida director, said women occasionally tell her, “My husband already votes, so I don’t have to sign up.” Tammy Ayon, the Florida director, said she has pro-voting fatwas, or Islamic legal pronouncements, ready to show the people who still say elections “are not part of my faith.”

And Trump’s bigotry can cause some Muslims to withdraw rather than act. For some Muslims from the Middle East and Africa, his accusatory fury calls to mind the leaders who would arrest them for trying to participate in public life.

“And so I tell them not to be intimidated by this kind of speech,” said Abdul-Malik. “I tell people, we’re not going to allow the hostile political rhetoric to either make us intimidated or afraid. And I tell our people to be very confident. Truth stands out from falsehood. That’s what the Quran says.”

Enough Muslims are taking action to potentially affect the outcome in swing states like Virginia and Florida. Most eager, by all accounts, are nervous Muslim millennials like Bhatti, who said Trump may end up inadvertently doing them a favour.

“It’s like a blessing in disguise,” she said. “Because it’s pushing people to be more involved in the process.”

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